Current treatments for coronary artery disease include the use of stents, angioplasty, rotational atherectomy, cutting balloons, pharmaceutical agents, and lasers. All of these treatments attempt to increase blood flow at the narrowed region of the diseased vessel by compressing the intimal (innermost) aspect of the blood vessel against the medial (layer containing smooth muscle cells) and adventitial (outermost) layers of the vessel. These treatments often fail to increase the effective diameter of the coronary artery over a long period of time.
One of the drawback of interventional or catheter-based approaches is their inability to increase the coronary artery diameter for a prolonged period of time. Restenosis, a process that occurs when the smooth muscle cells and fibroblasts are stimulated to proliferate, frequently results after these interventional procedures. This re-narrowing of the blood vessel lumen reduces the effective diameter of the artery. With stents, their ability to correct diseased blood vessels can be hampered by their failure to traverse certain lesions, the difficulty in placing them in highly tortuous vessels, and the potential immunological problems associated with leaving the stents, which are foreign substances, in the vessel. When these treatments fail to adequately correct the situation, coronary artery bypass graft surgery (CABG) is usually required. However, this surgery is often expensive and results in prolonged incapacitation and post-surgical pain for the patient.
There is thus a need for a method and device for treating diseased blood vessels that avoids the aforementioned problems associated with stents, angioplasty, or CABG surgery. Particularly desirable are methods and devices that may enable a surgeon or interventional cardiologist to treat coronary artery disease by increasing the effective diameter of the coronary artery and maintaining this effective diameter for a sufficient period of time.